Wood smells like we should be able to eat it, but we can't.

hperrin@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 300 points –
135

Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.

Also ginger.

And technically wormwood too, although that's more you drinking water that is soaked into wood.

Ginger is a root, maybe you’re thinking of something else?

Eh what is a root if not wood that is covered in dirt

So is a potato wood? A carrot?

Ginger is not a tree. It’s a flowering plant.

A potato is not a flowering plant it's a tuba, such as an onion. Totally different thing entirely to a bit of wood attached to a tree.

And potato is a tuber but an onion is not. Both are flowering plants. So is ginger.

Ginger has nothing to do with ‘a bit of wood attached to a tree’ which is exactly my point.

Potato plants absolutely have flowers. Have you ever grown one? Be careful with the potato flowers and fruits. They are poisonous nightshade.

You using a different kind of sumac than the rest of us? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumac#In_food

I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.

The bit about powdered sumac (bark?) being a powerful dye for marble is pretty interesting. I wish there was an example photo.

That's what whiskey is for

And smoking anything, it's definitely part of food as a taste just not the wood it self as an ingredient.

Being used to make the fire/smoke that cooks the food is a really good point, wood is definitely food adjacent even if it's not strictly edible.

Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.

I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.

5/7 with rice. Thank you for the suggestion.

If you've eaten shredded cheese from the store, then you've eaten wood.

U can eat it. Its just not particularly nutritious or paletable.

I still wonder why if we need more fiber in our diets we don't just toss wood pulp in everything.

Apparently supplemented processed fiber gives you liver cancer though.

Tldr: Inulin bad.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/diets-high-in-processed-fiber-may-increase-risk-of-liver-cancer-in-some-people

I wonder how depression era sawdust bread would work though.

The study that your article references is a mouse study, so the relevance to humans is questionable.

In addition, fiber is shown to be beneficial to humans primarily when comparing the standard American diet to a high-fiber diet. This is likely because fiber is mostly non-digestable by humans (as we've lost the ability to digest fiber more than 2-million years ago unlike our closest living great-ape cousins), and acts as a physical barrier to the absorption of sugars and starches which also helps to lower insulin spikes.

If you do not eat a high-carb diet (such as a ketogenic diet), then eliminating the undigestable matter (i.e. fiber) from your diet is probably beneficial because you'll be able to absorb more nutrients and get rid of constipation-related issues.

For the majority of human history, we've eaten around wood (around a campfire, a hearth, etc), it makes sense it would become intertwined with our food palette

We can, and do, eat wood. It's listed as "cellulose" in the ingredients, and it's in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now

That’s made from plants, including trees, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

OP confirmed for beaver with dental issues.

It might interest you to know that we do eat wood when we eat that sprinkled parmesan or romano cheese in the plastic containers: It contains wood to prevent the cheese from clumping (and it counts as fiber)

If you consider cellulose to be wood, sure. They don't put actual wood in there.

What cellulose do they use then?

Cellulose can come from just about any type of plant. Cotton is almost entirely cellulose, for example.

I don't know what their cellulose comes from, but saying cellulose is trees is like saying milk is cheese.

Wood is notoriously hard to digest. After wood evolved, it took millions of years before funghi and bacteria evolved the ability to decompose it. And that's why we have oil now.

There was a point during that millions of years where there were areas of thousands of feet deep layers of dead trees. It still boggles my mind.

Would you be willing to find a good article explaining this further? This sounds really neat and I'd like to know how scientists figured this out :O

Wood is the reason for climate change!

And now these hippies want to plant even more trees.

Who are they to stand in the way of climate change‽

I'm... not so sure about this. Also we can eat paper and that's just mashed up wood, right?

We can consume it, but we can’t digest it.

Also, we should consume it (or other types of dietary fibre)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3614039/

Dietary fibre is that part of plant material in the diet which is resistant to enzymatic digestion which includes cellulose, noncellulosic polysaccharides such as hemicellulose, pectic substances, gums, mucilages and a non-carbohydrate component lignin. The diets rich in fibre such as cereals, nuts, fruits and vegetables have a positive effect on health since their consumption has been related to decreased incidence of several diseases. Dietary fibre can be used in various functional foods like bakery, drinks, beverages and meat products. Influence of different processing treatments (like extrusion-cooking, canning, grinding, boiling, frying) alters the physico- chemical properties of dietary fibre and improves their functionality. Dietary fibre can be determined by different methods, mainly by: enzymic gravimetric and enzymic—chemical methods. This paper presents the recent developments in the extraction, applications and functions of dietary fibre in different food products.

Not that we should go around gnawing on wood like beavers, but maybe that's why some indigestible foods seem like we should be able to eat it

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You can. I know a guy who eats a birch log every year. He literally sits on the couch pulling splinters from the log and chews on them while watching tv. He also grinds his egg shells and mixes with oatmeal.

I’m guessing it sort of came from the fact that we cook food with burning wood. Less so now, but burning wood meant cooked food for 200k years.

I don’t think wood smells like it is edible, but a fire can remind me of food through smell.

There are plenty alcohols, like whiskey and wine, that are supposed to have "oaky" flavors due to the barrels they're kept in.

Hey nobody's stopping you from gnawing on some cedar shavings my dude.

who smells wood and thinks "you know what? I want to slap that pine tree on my pancake"?

Maybe not a pine tree, but I love birch beer. My parents cut down an old birch tree years ago, and it smelled AWESOME!

I’m not a huge fan of pine, but maple smells delicious.

I'm not sure I agree about the smell of wooe, but the cambium of many different tree species is perfectly edible. Have at it, my friend!

This should be an unpopular opinion instead, because almost no one associates the smell with a desire to eat it.

All the 10s in my neighborhood love to gobble on my wood, though?

Edit: It was a joke. There are no 10s in my neighborhoods, and if there were, they would probably not choose to have intimate relations with me.